1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to enabling a higher-level software application to query and control a sensor through a generic interface.
2. Description of Background Art
A sensor is generally queried and controlled directly via its device driver. For example, an application uses a device driver in order to query and control a sensor. Sensor device drivers have many disadvantages. Consider a sensor that is designed to communicate with a computer via a particular input/output device, such as a portable computer (PC) card. In order for an application on the computer to query or control the sensor, the application must execute in an operating system that supports the PC card. Also, communication with a sensor driver is often limited to one device at a time, which prevents multiple devices from querying or controlling a sensor simultaneously. Finally, a sensor driver often supports a fixed set of sampling rates (e.g., rates for obtaining data from the sensor), which prevents obtaining data at other rates.
What is needed is a generic interface that enables a higher-level software application to query and control a sensor.